Regeneration is Olympic key

Richard Caborn, the Sports Minister, who has just returned from a visit to Sydney, gave a strong indication to Telegraph Sport that the Government were more than ready to be convinced that an Olympics could help regenerate London.

Caborn said: "You would never have the Olympics just for the sake of the Olympics. The 17 days of sport as a spectacle does produce a feel-good factor but, as Manchester shows, that fades.

You could use the Olympics to do things that need to be done. There is the Thames Gateway project and an Olympics can be used for regeneration - to create houses which will meet the housing shortage London faces - and to build the transport infrastructure the city needs.

The question is can an Olympics play a role in tackling these problems? The key thing is that if we are going to do it we must all know why we are going to do it. It has to be an idea that the whole of the Government, and everybody, signs up for."

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Caborn, along with Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, is making visits to Olympic cities to see how they have handled the Games and what lessons they learnt. Caborn goes to Athens on Dec 4 and visits Moscow and Munich the following week. He has returned from Sydney all the more convinced of the need for a theme and a purpose if London is to bid for the Olympics.

"There are two things the people in Sydney told me. The Olympics was meant to put Sydney and Australia, which is on the far side of the world, on the 21st century map, an objective they achieved. London does not need an Olympics to be put on the map. It is already one of the world's great cities. But you can use the Olympics to regenerate a city like Barcelona did."

The other thing Sydney told Caborn was that: "If they were doing it all over again they would make sure they had a better exit strategy for the facilities they built. They would make more use of existing facilities. The hockey and tennis facilities they built in Homebush, for instance, are very underused.

We need to heed the Sydney lesson and make sure we have an exit strategy for the facilities and make more use of the existing venues London already has."

Money will clearly be a key factor and immediately after the Arup report - which examined the costs and benefits of an Olympics bid - was released, Caborn was quoted as saying that the Olympics could cost double the £2 billion Arup had suggested.

When asked, he explained, "What I said was that going by past experience the price is always double between the time the bid is made and the time the project is complete. But it depends on how you add up the figures.

If you put the cost of Cross Rail into the bid then that means adding another £6 billion or £7 billion and that would more than triple the costs. In Sydney they did not add the cost of the motorway to the Olympics."

But could Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, veto the idea of the Olympics on costs as some newspapers have suggested?

Caborn firmly dismissed that idea. "It has not come to that. At the moment all the departments are being asked their views. The Arup report has gone to the Treasury, Transport, and Security. We shall get their responses.

Then, based on our assessments of the cites that have staged the games, Tessa will prepare a report for cabinet and it will be a decision of the full cabinet, sometime in early in the new year. It will not be a decision taken lightly."

Before the Government take the decision they will also have an assessment from the British Olympic Association of the likely chances of London winning the bid. "If we bid," says Caborn, "we want to make sure we win. And that assessment must come from the BOA. We will not go just for the ride."

Caborn knows all about going for the ride, having been involved in the World Student Games in Sheffield. he also led an abortive bid to stage the Commonwealth Games and is determined to avoid that experience.